Planting the flag: A strategy for ICT-enabled local public services reform

A strategy for ICT-enabled reform

Planting the Flag embraces the full scope of local public services through the lens of local government – the constitutional source of local democratic participation and leadership.

There has never been a strategy of this kind to guide the deployment of ICT to modernise the delivery of services across the local public sector. And it is timely: unprecedented budget reductions faced by local public services require unprecedented action and reform. Compelling economic, social, and environmental pressures require fundamental changes in the way that people, processes and technology interact to deliver the services people need.

In this first phase of the strategy, we ‘stake out the territory’ for ICT as an enabler of change and a key ingredient for better public service outcomes and major savings.

Implementation of public service reform at a local level must take account of local circumstances – demographics, previous investment and geography. Successive governments have mistakenly assumed that ‘one size fits all’ for local public services, and this has led to rigid, large-scale, technology-led programmes driven from Whitehall that have struggled to deliver value.

Planting the Flag offers an alternative approach – one which assumes national standards and policies, but which allows local choice and pragmatic implementation, supported by relevant guidance. It builds on local public services’ cost effective and innovative deployment of ICT, but also acknowledges that economies of scale and scope are essential for efficiency and sustainability.

Planting the Flag addresses local authorities, emergency services, health, education and civil society organisations. It assumes that services must be delivered through unprecedented collaboration across agencies, with businesses, with communities and with citizens. It draws on the strong body of evidence Socitm has gathered to show how ICT can enable collaboration, innovation and re-design of service delivery.

Crucially, Planting the Flag sets out how local public services can derive significantly more value from ICT, but also how they can reduce the cost of ICT. Our focus is less on technology and more on specific principles about the ‘what and how’ of organisational change – in particular, how to get rid of the unhelpful, technology-led cultures and practices that all too frequently have accompanied ICT procurement, deployment and management in the past.

Section one sets out three core principles for reform of local public services – collaborate, redesign and innovate.

Section two sets out six capabilities for reforming local public services and in section three, six key information and technology issues that will determine success. For each of these capabilities and issues we:

• Describe the scenario we would like to see in five years time
• Set out what needs to change and why
• Say how change can be achieved
• State what key players need to do now to start the change process

Three core principles

Three core principles, that will allow greater value to be derived from ICT, and will also reduce the cost of ICT, should sit at the heart of local public service reform: collaborate, re-design, and innovate.

Collaborate, share and re-use assets

Local public service organisations should join-up service delivery strategies and support them with collaboratively developed, ICT-enabled, delivery processes and communications functions. They should jointly commission ICT and other infrastructure and services, pool budgets, share staff, and measure, capture and share benefits and savings.

Examples include:

• Integrating back and front office staff across partner organisations.
• Sharing front offices e.g. local authority, health, police and third sector organisations.
• Streamlining governance structures and pooling budgets across places.

Redesign services to simplify, standardise and automate

Services needed to deliver priority local public service outcomes should be redesigned and ICT-enabled, using open and reusable standards to meet aspirations for ‘anytime, anywhere, any device’ access. The outcomes that service users value will be delivered by people, performing processes, with information, underpinned and enabled through technology. Only when all four elements are considered together, through formal change management, will ‘change’ deliver value to our citizens and their public service organisations. Services, whether internal or external, should be designed as ‘digital by default’. Action should be taken to improve significantly the ICT, change, and information management skills of all managers, staff and service users.

Examples include:

• Community-based service organisations
• Single, shared information resources for all service channels (face-to-face, telephone and web)
• Flexible working and ‘workstyle’ programmes enabling staff to work from anywhere

Innovate to empower citizens and communities

Social and digital inclusion should be built by shifting ownership and use of information and technology towards the service user. Service users, SMEs and the technology sector should be engaged in service design and delivery, and resources, information and skills should be used in the community to build local systems and services. Local public service organisations should act quickly and not be afraid to take considered and controlled risks.

Examples include:

• Personalisation of social care
• On-demand waste recycling services
• Procurement – use of competitions, reverse auctions, etc.
• APIs to enable access to and exploitation of data to achieve new outcomes.
• Creation of environments to encourage development of ‘apps’.
• Use of Wikis, forums, SMS messaging
• Conference call technology, Skype
• New ways of developing skills
• Digital inclusion initiatives

Six strategic capabilities

Our research identifies six strategic capabilities that need to be in place if ICT-enabled local public services reform is to be achieved in any given locality:

1. Leadership from CIOs
2. Governance
3. Organisational change
4. Strategic commissioning and supplier management
5. Shared services
6. Professionalism

1. Leadership from CIOs

In five years’ time…

Strong leadership from CIOs will have realised the potential of ICT to enable the organisational changes needed to reform local public services. Politicians, managers, staff and citizens will be engaged in addressing the problem of fragmented services and the legacy of paternalistic approaches.
CIOs will have played a central role in this, because of the need to unlock the potential of technology, but also because the best ICT professionals are highly skilled in programme and risk management. Leadership from CIOs will have energised people and organisations to make more intelligent and collaborative use of information and technology, in order to deliver more efficient and fairer public service outcomes.

What needs to change and why

If they are to achieve this, CIOs will need to demonstrate that they and their teams have the range of skills needed to build partnerships, to redesign services, and to help business areas develop innovative solutions.

These capabilities are already in place in many ICT teams, but are undervalued or misunderstood in public service organisations that still practise traditional ICT management. Key leadership traits comprise:

• Inspiring and articulating the vision for reformed and ICT-enabled local public services
• Addressing problems as well as opportunities, not necessarily knowing the answers (many of which will be unknown), but having the ability to engage people – politicians, executive, managers, staff and citizens – by asking questions and prompting their ideas
• Conserving what is valuable from the past
• Positioning leadership of business change, enabled by ICT, based on thinking analytically understanding the objective conditions – and acting collaboratively – empathising with the subjective beliefs of other competing stakeholders in addressing the local public services environment

How we can do this

How can CIOs and those around them deploy these capabilities? We propose a two-pronged focus for CIOs – outwards and inwards:

Outwards	Action	Inwards
Generate demand side vision and action, through building relationships and collaboration with key stakeholders and partners.	Creating – using emotional intelligence to build ‘followership’ and to challenge constructively.	Ensure all voices are heard, vision is articulated and issues and innovations are captured.
Reach out and offer value to every area of the business, always engaging in terms of what ICT brings to agreed public service outcomes and to ROI – the ‘bottom-line’.	Engaging – ditch the jargon and talk convincingly in terms of public service outcomes and what you have achieved, as well as what you seek to achieve.	Embed strategic, business-enabling role of ICT in decisions and actions through compelling, repeated communications and engagement.
Influence commitment, accountability and transparency.	Executing – demonstrate an understanding about every aspect of local public services activity	Keep resources engaged and motivated to execute, through excellent business change, programme and project management.

The approach to CIO leadership outlined here will bring professional and personal payoffs:

Professional – collaborative partnership will help to make transparent the value contributed by ICT directly to local public service outcomes.

Personal – CIOs will accomplish more by doing less, their teams will be happier and their will be more productive relationships with partner organisations.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Demand and encourage leadership from your CIO for business change.

CIO: Local public services ICT is one of the toughest areas you can work in – more so, perhaps, than in all areas other than the chief executive. One reason is that, unlike other areas (eg finance, legal and even HR), natural proximity and involvement at Board level is not assumed. So, above all, CIOs need to be:

• Positive and creative at all times, often in the face of ignorance and willful obstruction
• ‘Thick-skinned’ because it is tough and you will get constant challenge, resistance to change and criticism
• High-energy – it takes long hours and is emotionally draining

CFO: Facilitate the leadership role of the CIO by putting in place the financial performance measures and processes to realise savings and benefits from business change.

2. Governance

In five years’ time…

Alongside leadership, the right governance arrangements are critical for ICT-enabled local public services reform. This is not easy. The experience of local strategic partnerships demonstrates that local public services are often stronger on governance of policy issues than on the governance of the implementation of those policies. Nor is there one single prescription, given the diversity of places and needs evident across the UK.

However, if the following principles are applied to the process of business change, we will start to see more efficient and fairer local public services outcomes through collaborating, reforming and innovating:

• Strategic governance is focused on defining required outcomes
• Implementation governance designs and delivers new ways of working – people, process, information and technology – that will realise those outcomes

Strategic governance is engaged with and committed to the implementation approach

What needs to change and why

The governance of public service change programmes – shared services, channel shift, business process automation – is not at present done consistently well across the public sector.

There is a long history of reviews into failure, particularly of so-called (but often wrongly labelled) ‘IT projects’, with little evidence that such reviews result in significantly improved results.

There are two issues. First, too often change initiatives only deal with part of the issue, for example, they implement a technological solution without addressing the other components of change, or they set a policy direction without adequately considering the technological implications. The focus needs to be on running business change, not ICT, projects. Second, the challenges of implementation are not addressed effectively, under-estimating the risks, change management, human resource issues and resulting in the embarrassment of policy being derailed.

Local public services leaders, including chief executives, cabinets, mayors (or their equivalent) should start by working with local partners to prioritise local public service outcomes. A business change ‘programme board’ should be established for each priority outcome (or related groups of them), with representation spanning the relevant local public services and potentially other stakeholders such as the private and third sectors and trade unions. Each board should have responsibility for establishing and overseeing a portfolio of business change programmes and projects, and for developing and implementing information and technology strategies to enable these.

How we can do this

The programme governance arrangements can be flexible to suit the local culture but, critically, in all cases must include senior management representation from organisations that will be most impacted by the change. This includes CIOs, given the dependence on ICT of the majority of business transformation programmes.

Local politicians will also need to be engaged; whether that is directly on programme boards or through mechanisms such as member reference groups will depend on local circumstances.

Boards should have a separate identity; effective governance cannot be achieved through, for example, tacking a programme discussion on to the agenda of a management team. Boards should include:

Top level sponsorship – a member of the corporate management team and, possibly, a senior (cabinet or equivalent) politician

• The programme manager for the relevant priority service outcome to be reformed
• Project managers responsible for implementing reform
• Representatives of key stakeholders

Programme boards should submit business cases and plans for approval at the policy level, for example by the cabinet. From a financial perspective, boards need to be supported in taking a ‘whole term plan’ view, so that funds required in later years are committed and not removed.

A ‘programme office’ should be established to oversee programmes and constituent projects.

A practical mechanism will be required to stop partners creating additional governance arrangements, blocking innovation and reducing the value of shared services. This in turn will allow further partners see the opportunity and join established services.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Gain support from the political leadership for the business reform programme and agree the governance structure.

CIO: Identify the key people and establish them in their roles within the governance structure.

CFO: Establish the financial systems and reporting to enable the governance arrangements to function effectively.

3. Organisational change

In five years’ time…

A comprehensive and inclusive approach to the reform of local public services should be in place to support the leadership and governance of organisational change. This approach should address opportunities and risks with clear assignment of responsibilities.

Organisational and business change (portfolio) management will then enable categorisation and ranking of local public service outcomes to meet strategic and community objectives in an impartial way. It will also allow transparent and open consideration of priority issues in the locality.

What needs to change and why

All too frequently, public services are duplicated, misaligned, and configured around the convenience of organisations. They may be housed in multiple tiers of government, or fragmented across other providers.

That ICT is the key component in enabling radically different approaches to local delivery of public services is insufficiently recognised. Both political and managerial leadership need to take action in order to grasp the potential of ICT whilst recognising that transformational change will only be realised by marrying ICT opportunities with complementary changes to people, process and information management.

A cultural acceptance of ICT-enabled change and reform – collaboration, redesign and innovation driven by a vision of more efficient and fairer local public service outcomes is essential to allow the relevant change methodologies to be embedded into the partner organisations in any given locality.

How we can do this

Specific, organisational change management capability is required to implement new ICT-enabled, service-led operating models that cross traditional organisation boundaries and that are focused on the needs of service users and their communities.

This capability needs to be underpinned by a clear and well-understood methodology to manage local public services reform, including both the opportunities and the risks. One method, developed in the local public services setting, that supports outcome-focused organisational change and is free of royalty or licence costs, is CHAMPS2. Standardising on a specific approach means that organisational learning is possible; expertise developed in one project can be deployed in future projects, with lessons learnt as appropriate, and individuals can develop their change management professionalism.

An important starting point is to identify and manage business priorities and strategic initiatives to drive the portfolio of programmes and projects that are needed to achieve priority local public service outcomes. Doing the right things well requires portfolio management to be operated at the CEO level with a focus on business benefit, savings and risk assessment.

These approaches can be deployed alongside so-called ‘lean’ and accredited programme (MSP) and project (PRINCE2) methodologies, as may be appropriate for the particular local environment.

Projects involving collaboration, redesign, innovation, operation and administration need to be managed differently than business as usual; both large and small projects need ‘right’ time and ‘right’ resources to deliver to agreed quality and cost criteria. Sufficient and sufficiently senior management resources with the appropriate skills need to be freed up from operational service responsibilities: where attempts are made to deliver change projects as a sideline to ‘business as usual’ they will tend to fail.

All change projects should ensure that there are sufficient viewpoints brought to bear on the design of the future operating model. The organisational structure of much of the public sector, and local government in particular, with its often close alignment to individual professions, militates against radical change. Whilst recognising that it has its virtues, the conservative perspective that results requires robust challenge.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Evaluate and endorse the recommended methodologies to be adopted to manage reform and ensure relevant skills are developed/in place.

CIO: Be the senior responsible officer for business change, risk and programme management.

CFO: Ensure that every project has a robust business case and challenge each; for example, every project should be reviewed to see if a shared service solution would provide best value. Avoid, or cancel, projects with poor return on investment or no direct or indirect benefit to the community. Balance the need for cost reductions in the ICT service with a recognition of the value it can bring to overall organisational efficiency.

4. Strategic commissioning and supplier management

In five years’ time…

Strategic, joined-up approaches to specification and commissioning of services (ICT or otherwise) will be delivering increased value through aggregation and rationalisation.

The emphasis will be on effective partnership working, collecting data on service costs, running competitive outcome-based procurements and monitoring and assessing performance against those outcomes, with feedback and engagement of service users at every stage. Managing risk and innovation will be based on the needs of and privacy concerns of the citizen rather than the convenience of organisations. Reuse of existing contracts will be maximised and input-based specifications and single organisation tenders reduced.

Depending upon local political choice the full range of priority public service outcomes in any given locality could be addressed by a strategic commissioning approach. This should lower the costs of procurement and open up the market to SMEs and new entrants that may be able to offer innovative ways of delivering local public service outcomes enabled by ICT.

What needs to change and why

Leadership of, and collaboration in, strategic commissioning needs to be built around a new relationship with the private sector and civil society, focused on the priority outcomes for any given locality.

According to EURIM (2009), ICT procurement projects, especially those that span organisational boundaries, are likely to be successful when their originators:

• Say what the business outcome should be, and how success will be measured. Technology is usually only a component of a wider business change and emphasis should be on achieving business outcomes – the ‘what’, not the ‘how’.
• Understand and manage the risks to delivery throughout the project ensuring plans (and budgets) are in place to manage them.
• Incentivise delivery and innovation, through performance monitoring during the project to review whether the desired outcomes are still relevant and whether they can realistically be achieved.

How we can do this

The LGA and CBI (2008) propose that strategic commissioning should be guided by seven clear principles:

• Centred on people: putting local people and communities at the heart of the process, and ensuring that they are engaged in the design and delivery of services so that the outcomes delivered are the ones that really matter to them.
• Smoother collaboration: developing a three-way relationship between the client, supplier and service user, based on trust, will create a shared sense of what people want to achieve and some degree of consensus on cause and effect – the things.
• Better evidence and deeper analysis: a whole-needs analysis of populations will better identify service priorities.
• Clearer outcomes: clear signposting between outcomes, and identifying clear links with inputs and outputs, will show how they fit into the strategic policy context.
• Better dialogue: early dialogue within client teams, for example, between technical staff (heads of procurement) and strategic staff (chief executives), and between client teams and suppliers, will mean operational programmes are joined-up with strategic policy goals.
• Improved sustainability: the sustainable management of services and assets demands a focus on quality and value for money – not lowest cost – so that more is achieved with less in an environmentally friendly way.
• Contractual challenge: transparent information about the cost and performance of local services will allow authorities to make accurate assessments about whether existing services represent value for money.

In practice, the following steps will need to be addressed:

• Create a political environment that encourages joint commissioning and challenges obstacles to change.
• Distinguish core services, informed by local policy, from generic functions where the priority concern is value for money.
• Identify and establish the key partnerships that will underpin future service requirements.
• Establish ‘light touch’ governance to encourage cooperation in an environment comprising multiple partnerships.
• Shift decision criteria towards benefits realisation derived from service outcomes.
• Identify technical architectures essential for delivery collaborative partnerships.
• Stop. Review and assess all current and future initiatives and renewals for potential capacity to be used as strategic commissioning vehicles.
• Promote and support existing structures, partnerships and professional bodies, internal and external to harness capacity in support of the agenda.
• Communicate and share best practice. Do not reinvent where a solution is already available to public services.
• Develop a framework for risks and benefits analysis, based on value and quality of service outcomes, to replace organisation-centric solutions.
• Incorporate the strategic commissioning approach advocated into the procurement process.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Work with partners to embed the principles of strategic commissioning and supplier management into the culture of local public services in your locality.

CIO: Build strategic relationships and dialogues with ICT suppliers.

CFO: Introduce transparency over costs and performance, and implement risk management and outcome-based performance monitoring for contracts.

5. Shared services

In five years’ time…

Shared services will have been adopted much more widely in response to the need for improved public service efficiency and locally joined up public services.

Experience shows that ICT will be critical to their success, delivering essential components for integrated public services, including communications, secure systems and information, and universal ICT infrastructure.

Not only will ICT be enabling shared services, ICT itself will inevitably be shared as well, with integrated and consolidated ICT infrastructure, services, applications, management and support arrangements in place.

These shared services will be provided by a variety of arrangements, including consortia, joint ventures, outsourced partnerships, mutualised services etc., often run by larger public service organisations (e.g. county councils) or by private sector/social enterprise companies on behalf of a myriad of smaller local service agencies. Choice of solution will be dictated by evidence of best practice, high value, flexibility and genuine partnership ethos (not ‘big’ dictating to ‘the small’).

Whilst outsourced ICT will grow, evidence shows that traditional outsourcing of ICT in some parts of the public sector has been naïve – underestimating costs, risks and the strategic value of ICT. In future, arrangements must prove their worth more transparently, with open scrutiny of cost and value delivered. Small scale outsourcing to avoid larger scale shared services will often be unsustainable, as well as undesirable.

What needs to change and why

Shared arrangements offer the opportunity to reduce very significantly the cost of local public services though economies of scale and scope, standardisation and shared risks, and in the next few years local public service organisations will have no choice but to exploit shared arrangements much more aggressively.

For ICT, shared services offer smaller organisations access to a range of ICT innovations and support that are necessary to run resilient and robust ICT services and which will become increasingly unaffordable on an individual basis.

A wide variety of models for shared services already operate across the UK – shared appointments, shared service areas, joint ventures, strategic partnerships and so on. Each organisation should determine how best it can develop shared arrangements in its own local setting, building on the evidence Socitm and others have published on what is really working and delivering the most value at a local level.

A. Shared ICT services:

There are too many ICT departments, data centres, networks, service desks and contracts in the public sector. At a time when demands for ICT are increasing, pooling professional and technical resources can help to protect this critical but scarce resource in the face of cuts. In particular, we will see:

• Consolidation – fewer, larger, regional public service networks, data centres and service contracts, owned jointly.
• Joint appointments of senior ICT professionals to run infrastructure across teams and across organisations. This will include integrated support desks, especially for out of hours support.
• Joint ICT specialist teams (e.g. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc) sharing design, development and support, often with, and even on behalf of, private sector partners.
• Less (or no) further ICT procurement without first adopting a shared approach and using existing contracts or services. This also implies changed procurement policies and procedures in favour of joint contracts spanning local and central public services.

Achieving this result needs certain things to change:

• Simple outsourcing is not the answer – the public sector needs to secure the benefits of aggregation, with more value, flexibility and lower costs from ICT outsourcing than has been the case previously.
• The public sector needs to build, retain and deploy its own scarce ICT skills, rather than relying so heavily on consultancy. Why pay more for scarce skills especially if they exist already but need to be shared?
• Sovereignty over ICT really does not matter providing it is doing a good job. Let ‘the best’ run ‘the rest’ and stop trying to own and run it all yourself.
• A cooperative model works well for ICT, and this has been proved in many areas already. It has the advantage of allowing larger and smaller organisations to work together on an equal basis, and give flexibility for organisations to choose how deeply they engage and when
• A willingness of police, councils, health and central government organisations to share ICT

B. ICT-enabled shared services:

• All shared services require ICT to enable information sharing, joint communications and shared systems. Services must plan accordingly and engage ICT as a core strategic resource, not as a support service alone.
• Engagement needs to start early because ICT implementation has a lead time – typically 12 -18 months.
• Sharing ICT systems requires alignment of business and service practices – a single finance system shared by two councils requires agreement to share processes first.

Above all, public service leaders need to ensure ICT is seen as and used as a strategic function to drive innovation, business change, customer service improvement and new, more efficient delivery models.

How we can do this

Several ingredients need to be in place before shared services, including shared ICT services, are possible:

• Political support and a genuine willingness to collaborate and share territory between service heads such as CIOs.
• Understanding of where the costs currently fall and where benefits and savings are likely to accrue, and willingness to let go – the ‘tightloose’ model.
• Agreement on the governance and funding models which ensure risks, costs and savings are shared equitably based on the level of commitment made.
• Agreed priorities for shared services that reflect the interest and starting position of partners. For ICT this is likely to be around procurement and infrastructure such as data centres and public service networks.

Consideration of shared ICT services must include exploration of the following opportunities:

• ICT infrastructure (e.g. public sector networks and data centres) and associated services aggregated and managed by fewer organisations.
• Senior professionals managing and running ICT infrastructure and support desks, and technical specialists shared.
• ICT to enable organisational change, information sharing and integration, with the joint communications and systems required for shared local public services.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Lead strategic thinking of shared services – for every service, ask the question: why not a shared service? Seek priorities from the local political leadership. Consider and support the role of the CIO and ICT leadership in making shared services possible

CIO: Use the regional forums and relationships that you already have to identify opportunities for sharing ICT resources. Ensure ICT activity, capability and capacity is aligned to the shared service priorities of the organisation.

CFO: Identify the shared service models that would be appropriate and acceptable to your local public service organisation.

6. Professionalism

In five years’ time…

Capability for leading and managing ICT-enabled reform and efficiency will be more critical and more widely recognised than it is today. In top performing public service organisations, CIOs and Heads of IT will be expected to deliver innovation, improved customer service and organisational change programmes – not just to run traditional ICT services.

The core capability and skills of the ICT professional in local public services will shift radically from where they lie now. Organisational change, programme and project management, information management, collaboration and strategic commissioning (procurement) will develop as significant roles for ICT professionals in local public services. Stronger links will emerge to key business areas including customer service and channel management, human resources, facilities management and new business ventures.

This will happen because ICT increasingly lies at the heart of these activities and their strategic value will be leveraged most effectively by experienced and capable ICT professionals. ICT professionals know about running change programmes, service design and, of course, technology risks and opportunities.

Historically, ICT professionals have looked to their employer to provide them with career development. In future, individuals, in conjunction with their professional bodies, will manage their own careers. Apprenticeships and internships will come back into fashion, particularly for school leavers who choose not to go to university. All those in the ICT profession will need to pay increasing attention to their own continuing professional development (CPD) and contacts. Employers will increasingly ask for and look at an individual’s CPD record.

Although ICT as a profession is unlikely to become regulated, over a longer timescale this may change. The profession will increasingly adopt the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) as the standard professional development reference point for the profession, and individuals will be expected to show evidence of accreditation for their skills, experience and professionalism.

The key driver over the next five years will a requirement for capabilities to achieve cost reduction in service delivery. ICT professionals will become more astute in recognising and delivering value from ICT for public service outcomes and this will become core to their performance assessment replacing the traditional ICT metrics of SLAs.

What needs to change and why

The major change needed is in attitudes – within ICT as a profession and in the way ICT professionals are viewed by the organisations that employ them:

• Organisations need to focus on reform and business change management. They should expect this capability and skill from their ICT professionals.
• Organisations must stop seeing ICT as a ‘centre of technology’ or as just a support service, and see it as a source of innovation, efficiency and improved service. Fear of ICT as a source of risk or potential project failure must be dealt with by a new professionalism
• ICT professionals need to think about and take control of their own career and its development.
• All organisational change, information, technology and digital professionals need to be able to access accreditation schemes of the same type as legal and finance professionals, so that organisations can be confident their skills and capabilities are fit for purpose, now and in the future.
• A complete map of capabilities and skills should be adopted for ICT professionals, including business change, information management, communications, collaboration, and strategic commissioning (procurement), using the SFIA framework.

How we can do this

The role of the CIO needs to be understood as one encompassing:

1. Organisational change management and process simplification
2. Business development enabled by ICT – shared services or new income generation.
3. Management of the organisation’s information assets.
4. Strategic commissioning and supplier management.
5. Leadership of the profession.

ICT Professionals in government will be accredited to the Government ICT Profession competency framework (based on SFIA). They will be supported by Socitm and should be able to work effectively across multiple local public service organisations. Socitm and LCIOC will work with SFIA to enhance the competencies and associated learning in each of the areas listed above.

Where ICT staff work in departments, for example delivering digital communications, their reporting line should be to the CIO, with a secondary reporting line to the functional head. This model reduces costs by preventing “stand alone” groups from forming.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Trust your CIO and position ICT within the organisation as a centre of change, innovation, efficiency and service improvement, not just as a technology support service.

CIO: Establish the CIO as Head of ICT Profession, adopt SFIA as the reference framework for the ICT professional staff and build the skills, attitudes and capabilities to meet the changing expectations of CEOs.

CFO/HR directors: CIO, CFO and Head of HR must work very closely together, respecting each other’s professionalism and building on the common interests of public service reform to deliver new ways of working, new service models and new ways of deploying resources.

Six key issues around information and technology

Effective information management and deployment of technology, within a context of fundamental organisational change, are key to redesigning local public services so that they deliver better for less. There are six key issues:

1. Information governance
2. Information management, assurance and transparency
3. Digital access and inclusion
4. Local public services infrastructure
5. Business change
6. ICT policies of central government departments

1. Information governance

In five years’ time…

Depending on their responsibilities and level of authorisation, people working in local public services will have fast, secure access to ‘a single version of the truth’ about people, assets, finance, service usage and performance. Much current practice in local public services around information governance, architecture and responsibilities will have changed.

Information governance that ensures effective use of information across and organisations and beyond, and takes account of risk, cost and time constraints, will be in place.

What needs to change and why

Anderson (2011) identifies seven dimensions for the process of information governance: Acquire, Validate, Store, Protect, Update, Publish
and Dispose

If any one of these dimensions is ignored, organisations run the risk of penalties for failure to safeguard sensitive or personal information assets, and ultimately this can place the public at risk.

CIOs will need to take responsibility for effective information governance – policies, awareness and implementation. All managers and staff will need to be aware of their roles in relation to the management and the use of information assets and the governance process.

Socitm’s research shows that information governance is at different levels of maturity in local public service organisations. Typically, organisations vest information governance, to the extent that it exists, in the chief legal officer or the CIO, concentrating on Freedom of Information and Data Protection Act responsibilities.

In order to move to a more mature level of information governance, local public service organisations need to understand the seven dimensions and to implement board-level responsibility. In larger organisations this may require constitution of an information governance board, with representation from across the business and its partners.

Arrangements for owning and sharing information will differ from place to place, depending upon the degree of collaboration and shared services, the size and complexity of organisations, and other factors.

Information governance should be able to demonstrate that information assets are managed in the interests of the citizens and businesses served locally. This will include assuring information at all stages of its use, overseeing protocols for information sharing, and maintaining transparency and openness. Through the consolidation and joining up of information assurance and management across places, information should be used more responsibly to deliver better joined-up outcomes for people.

How we can do this

• The CIO should advise the information governance board or equivalent. Local public service organisations should also establish a senior information risk officer (SIRO) in accordance with the Local Government Data Handling Guidelines.
• Roles and responsibilities of information owners and custodians should be clarified.
• Every local public sector manager needs to take a direct interest in the information that his or her team uses in order to be effective.

What key players need to do now

CEO: determine what information governance processes are needed and what form they should take.

CIO: ensure that best use is made of technology resources to enable effective information governance.

CFO (section 151 officer): should be most concerned about governance.

2. Information management, assurance and transparency

In five years’ time…

Information will be managed at every point in its ‘lifecycle’, from creation and collection through storage, control of access, amendment and deletion, retrieval, usage and eventual archive and destruction of information.

Alongside information management, information assurance will ensure that the automated flows of information are secure, appropriate, robust and efficient. For this to be achieved information architecture, transparency, confidentiality, integrity, standards, identification, authentication, sharing, security, business continuity and non-repudiation (of transactions once completed) will all need to be addressed.

What needs to change and why

Putting in place relevant information governance, management and assurance arrangements will unveil opportunities to transform local democracy and service design in areas such as:

• Engagement with citizens and businesses
• Direct accountability
• Customer access and self-service
• Flexible working
• Shared services.

Too many managers fail to recognise the value of information or appreciate the importance of its quality. Inability to share and a tendency to duplicate information across local public services are endemic. There is no common, local public services security framework. Release of ‘public’ information (i.e. information without privacy or state security issues) is not routine.

Information needs to be recognised as a strategic resource that requires management alongside the other key resources of people, finance and physical assets. Data and information, both structured and unstructured, are essential for effective collaboration between local public service organisations. It is important that these data and information are understood and properly managed across place-based service providers, if duplication and conflicting services are to be avoided. The growing requirement to share information between public authorities and civil society and private sector organisations makes it important to establish partner trust, and to be able to trust shared information.

Local authorities will need to play a leading role in applying the disciplines of information management and assurance across the complex web of public service delivery in localities. The exact arrangements for executing these disciplines in disparate organisations, including civil society organisations, will vary from place to place. Further, as the momentum gathers for individuals to maintain and manage their own personal information, citizens themselves will need to learn skills of data custodianship.

All of these issues need to be addressed with new, shared, information management policy and practice across local public services.

How we can do this

• Manage information at every point in its ‘lifecycle’, from creation and collection through storage, control of access, amendment and deletion, retrieval, usage and eventual archive and destruction of information.
• Introduce an information architecture across places, together with standards, identification, authentication and security for information handling.
• Adopt the Information Commissioner’s Data Sharing Code of Practice (currently awaiting the outcome of consultation).
• Ensure relevant behaviours of those who interact with information. A RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) analysis of information can help to clarify roles and responsibilities.
• Extend access by implementing a presumption that all data and information should be transparent and publicly available in accessible and, wherever possible in standard formats, unless there are privacy or public/state security reasons not to do so.
• Facilitate scrutiny and analysis of public data to improve accountability, to open up deliberation of service priorities, options and decision-making, and to assist better performance management
• Shift from a closed ‘database state’ style of operation towards more open, individual ownership and control of personal data, similar to online banking.
• Ensure a “single version of the truth” is available across all relevant local public services organisations e.g. common information available to support all access channels to services.
• Establish standards for interchanging data, similar to health data standards.
• Deploy a security regime that is proportionate, relevant and workable for ‘low threat environments’.
• Implement risk management that, whilst keeping data and information safe and secure, allows fully for sharing, transfer, exploitation and eventually safe destruction.
• IMAG Professionals in government should be accredited to the Government ICT Profession competency framework, through the ITPC framework

What key players need to do now

CEO: Ensure that all managers are aware of the value of the information that they manage.

CIO: Develop and introduce the information architecture for your local public services setting, with its associated attention to standards, identification, authentication, and security for information handling.

CFO: Undertake a RACI analysis of information to uncover the risks, opportunities and costs associated with effective information management.

3. Digital access and inclusion

In five years’ time…

By 2016, digital delivery will be the default for the majority of local public service interactions with citizens and businesses. These interactions will be characterised by anytime, anywhere, any device access; self-service (internally and externally to local public services, over the web and via telephony); and simplification and automation of processes.

For citizens this will mean more accessible and joined-up services, available when and where they want, designed around their individual needs. Those with special needs will also benefit because public services can be more readily designed to reflect the different needs of communities and minorities. For those requiring assisted access to services, a range of organisations will have access to essential electronic information and systems needed to help them.

Customer contact systems and services will have been integrated around local needs, making it easier, faster and cheaper for citizens to get the services they need. Interfaces to online services will be designed so that they can be deployed in contact centres or public-facing environments, with a mediated access routinely available. Digital, telephone and face-to-face channels will be managed and serviced under a single customer services and channel strategy.

The digital council of the future will also help local businesses by making contracts easier to bid for and to support, reducing the cost of doing business with the public sector. High speed broadband will be available to 99% of households and businesses, and rural broadband will depend on public service infrastructure which will in turn improve local economies and social inclusion.

Self-service will be the norm internally too, with public sector professionals increasingly using their own personal access devices, working from home or other public service buildings, enabling more efficient and effective, flexible work styles to be adopted. This implies appropriate levels of security and ICT flexibility of support and much lower cost access for the occasional ICT user.

Social media, e-petitions and other deliberative, online applications will be in widespread use enhancing local democracy and accountability.

Much access to public services will be via mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) increasingly over 4G
networks. Online services will be designed as standard to meet this requirement.

Improved levels of information and accountability, delivered digitally, will have driven up standards and quality of services in any given locality.

What needs to change and why

Processes will need redesigning for self-service to reflect the opportunity from technology.

Corporate customer and channel strategies need to be developed to fully exploit the opportunity for both citizen and employee self-service. Programmes to reduce phone and face-to-face contact whilst protecting access to information and services for vulnerable people and minority groups will need to be developed and implemented.

The necessary support (eg resilience and infrastructure) must be put in place to achieve 24/7 availability of information and services irrespective of location. Rural broadband, ‘not spots’ and bandwidth must be addressed.

Collaboration and sharing, including with the private sector and civil society organisations, should characterise development of online services (e.g. a single web-based parking permit service across major urban areas, shared revenues and benefits, joint public services, integrated health and
social care systems).

Local organisations will need to be given access to a wide range of information and systems so that delivery of public services can be reshaped around localities and local priorities.

Transparency and openness should be increased by making non-personal data public and allowing it
to be scrutinised and analysed .

Social media should be embraced to allow citizens to engage more actively in policy formulation and resource allocation, to hold local services to account and contribute to their delivery, and to get involved in devising and implementing their own solutions. This will contribute to the revitalisation of democracy and local communities. Notably, politicians and public service Boards need to see social media as an opportunity not a threat and learn how it can be harnessed effectively.

In future, services will need to be designed for online first. This turns on its head the old model in which services were designed for traditional phone and face to face interaction and then put online, leading to poor usability for users and associated inefficiencies in handling and processing.

Local decision-makers need to appreciate that in a world where digital literacy is increasingly important, digital inclusion – including skills and infrastructure – must be seen as an important objective that will have wider benefits than merely facilitating self service.

Local authorities and other public service delivery organisations should champion initiatives to support digital inclusion and to further the achievements of the Race Online 2012 campaign.

Local public service organisations should publish data to open standards to allow third parties, including local technology companies and community groups to use it to deliver applications and services.

How we can do this

In order to shift the balance of local public services access towards digital channels and self-service, the following measures need to be taken:

• Centralise management of customer access and bring the website and customer service advisors (phone and face-to-face) under the same management and as far as possible, into the same physical location.
• Implement measures to collect contact data for use in managing and improving services and reducing the cost of customer contact across all channels.
• Focus attention on reducing manual telephone and face-to-face contact volumes.
• Benchmark to identify best practice in customer access provision, management and practice, across all access channels and share learning from councils already experienced in this area.
• Implement a process for front and back office collaboration to effect change.
• Test website performance and accessibility with the help of citizens and improve it.
• Promote self service internally and externally as part of channel shift programmes.

Local public services should develop strategies, policies and practical plans for exploiting social media and networking tools to support citizen
engagement and service delivery.

In order to achieve the objective of employee access to systems so that they can work from ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’, several things must happen concurrently:

• Creation of a common, secure local PSN infrastructure to service shared office space and common mobile access.
• Provision of shared data centres for the hosting of applications and data across multiple agencies for delivery across the local PSN.
• Agreement on common standards for personal, mobile and office based end-user devices, built around the needs of different types of user, so that any local public services organisation can deliver its data and applications to the device anywhere and anytime. This will require:
  • Generic, browser based ICT applications and a standard ID and authentication process supported across any device.
  • Access to the PSN across both fixed and mobile networks.
  • Support for voice, data and video streaming.
• Creation of procurement frameworks that allow any authority to procure standard, compatible equipment.

A multi-authority support approach that services any connected user or device and streamlines related service desks, technology contracts, and service level agreements.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Centralise management of customer access and implement measures to collect contact data for use in developing ‘digital by default’ strategy for managing, improving and reducing the cost of customer contact across all channels.

CIO: Adopt standards to enable common information support to all channels and anytime, anywhere any device access.

CFO: Benchmark to identify best practice, costs and benefits in customer access provision, management and practice, across all access channels and share learning from councils already experienced in this area.

4. Local public services infrastructure

Local public services infrastructure includes all common and shared underlying ICT services on which applications and other services depend. They cover the so-called lower components of the ICT ‘stack’ – e.g. networks, data centres, telecommunications, storage and related technology services. Key elements are:

• The Public Sector Network
• Cloud services (Base Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service)
• Shared data centres and data centre consolidation
• Shared applications

In five years’ time…

Standards and accreditation processes will be set and agreed nationally for base public services ICT infrastructure components, taking into account
local ICT needs and most likely with some local variations.

As a result, standards will be built into vendors’ product offerings and be included in all local public services ICT Infrastructure procurements. This will
allow local choice in how infrastructure should develop to meet the needs of local circumstances.

In particular, all network procurements across the whole of the UK public sector will be to PSN standards but provided through multiple vendors and procured through numerous procurements. All local public services (including health, police, fire and the third sector) will have adopted the PSN ‘network of networks’.

Such an approach will have ensured increased competition and innovation, the ability to procure based on the local context and, through all complying with common standards, joined up outcomes.

Local public service leaders will ensure that ICT infrastructure strategy, architecture and commissioning decisions are carried out as a minimum at a regional/sub regional level and panpublic sector, so that local joined up outcomes can be delivered.

Smaller local public services organisations, such as district councils, may choose to work with larger neighbours using co-operative models of governance following the model of the existing Hampshire and Kent PSNs, and the PSBA in Wales – which also includes health and other public sector partners.

Cloud applications at an infrastructure and business productivity level will have been the first to be adopted in this timeframe, provided through a mix of public, private, hybrid or community cloud offerings working to G Cloud standards. Early over-selling of the benefits of ‘cloud computing’ will have been replaced with the true benefits of scalable, shared infrastructure services.

The ICT carbon footprint, in terms of cost, power consumption, environmental impact, space and associated resource, will have shrunk thanks to the effects of technology, economies of scale and more effective, joined-up ICT management. At the same time there will have been significant growth in ICT use, demand levels and complexity. In leading public service organisations ICT will be positioned as a critical resource, alongside Finance and Human Resources.

New infrastructure service technologies will allow staff to work securely anytime, anyplace, anywhere (across all public service organisations) and from most devices – including personally owned consumer based devices. This will enable substantial reductions in property costs, support localised and community-based working, and improve productivity and work-life balance for employees.

The new local public services ICT infrastructure could be delivering efficiencies in the region of 30- 40% over existing provision. The “pan-local” infrastructure will have provided the foundation for joint information systems and services delivering efficient and effective whole population / place-based local public service outcomes.

What needs to change and why

In the past, public service organisations have strongly guarded their own ICT infrastructure with either in-house or outsourced solutions. This has in some areas resulted in poor quality and high cost. Strong leadership will be needed to develop new partnership models for shared ICT infrastructure.

New business models must be developed, characterised by equal partnership and culture and branding that is about the whole, as opposed to the few. Larger public services organisations, whether national or local, need to be more flexible in working with smaller organisations. Smaller organisations need to recognise that detailed management and tailoring is no longer always necessary or affordable.

These changes will challenge the institutionally ingrained behaviours around ownership, control and mandate that are still prevalent in many public sector organisations. In order to maximise the benefits, local public service organisations need to collaborate more, not just at a system or infrastructure level, but at a business process level. Only in this way can deep and broad ICT consolidation follow (e.g. integrated and shared HR or finance teams and processes can lead to shared ERP or equivalent solutions).

The current financial crisis will force all local public service organisations to consider their current ICT commissioning approach, and whether they really need all the facilities of systems previously developed or purchased separately. The benefits in consolidating ICT infrastructure locally and building on existing investments are significant:

• Removal of duplicate procurement and management costs across multiple organisations – central and local government, academic sector, health agencies and public protection organisations such as police and fire.
• By consolidating the local ICT infrastructure footprint there is scope to deliver significant financial as well as environmental benefit.
• Re-utilisation of the 60% of government assets that are situated already in local public services – rather than these being separate from central government services or owned by multiple smaller organisations locally.
• Opportunities for smaller and local suppliers able to engage and take advantage of scale economy.
• Re-usable solutions (e.g. web-based applications become easier to share across the broader community) and a lead in to both public and private ‘cloud’ infrastructure services.

The local public service infrastructure model advocated here is not only consistent with the national government vision, but local choice will can also be accommodated – local public service organisations will have the choice over what can they afford, how fast they adopt, and where they see their priorities based on political, geographic and demographic interests. As such this vision offers more choice than is currently available and greater flexibility.

How we can do this

The key to helping organisations make progress is to have clear examples of where joined up approaches to delivering local public services ICT
infrastructure and related services can offer benefits and savings and, just as importantly, where they do not. These examples already exist and need widespread promotion. In addition:

• Every public service organisation should be considering how it will adopt PSN
• No new procurement of any ICT infrastructure by any public service organisations should be undertaken without considering the possibility of partnership
• All new contracts should be let on a shared basis, with the potential to be adopted nationally through OGC arrangements
• At a local level, all public services should consider collaborating on ICT infrastructure design, procurement and management, adopting well-publicised existing best practice
• All public service organisations should consider the potential of ICT shared ICT infrastructure as pre-requisite for any shared service initiatives, building on existing provision where possible rather than ‘inventing anew’.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Understand that in order to deliver joined up outcomes for localities there is a need for a joined up infrastructure.

CIO: Take the lead in facilitating local collaboration; build the business case and provision locally aggregated PSNs; and stop procuring new data centres.

CFO: Jointly engage with other Local Public Service organisations, with the help of your CIO, to pool budgets around Local Public Services ICT Infrastructure.

5. Business change

In five years’ time…

The value that ICT contributes as the crucial enabler of change will be recognised and appreciated by public service managers and politicians.

Business change will be perceived as central to organisational sustainability, because in a rapidly changing world, the way public services are delivered must be frequently refreshed if they are to retain the confidence of the public.

Business change activities will be seen as being at the heart of any reform agenda, turning policy into practice and critical to realising effectiveness and efficiency – to doing ‘better with less.’ Without a change-led approach ‘efficiencies’ will be understood primarily as a euphemism for service cuts.

The organisation will therefore be focused on business change projects, in which, because technological implementation is closely coupled to associated changes in process, organisational structures, job roles and the management of information, the CIO’s role will be seen as critical.

‘IT projects’ will be understood as being limited to purely technical activities, such as infrastructure implementation or application software upgrades.

Risk management will be valued as a core management competence, and risk avoidance recognised as an impediment to realising the organisation’s objectives.

Local public services will be co-designed and cocreated with the customers and delivered across organisational boundaries.

All business change activity will be predicated on defining and realising measurable outcomes and benefits.

What needs to change and why

Business change is currently seen as a risky activity and deservedly so, as more than half such projects (in both public and private sectors) fail to deliver their objectives. To redress this several things need to change.

First, public service organisations need to recognise that business change activities cannot be delivered as a sideline to operational business activities. Change projects need to be properly resourced and sufficient senior management capacity set aside to support their delivery.

Second, business change needs to be effectively governed by the organisation’s (or organisations’) leadership. It is fundamental to the future delivery of public services and it is therefore inappropriate to delegate or otherwise adopt a ‘hands off’ approach.

Third, an appropriate change management methodology, such as CHAMPS2, must be adopted to complement project management. Project management is good at controlling inputs, but is agnostic about realising outcomes; change management is concerned with defining and realising specific policy outcomes. Both are required.

Fourth, business change needs to be operationalised; it is too readily seen as a black art whose skills have only been bestowed on very special people. The scale of change required makes this perspective untenable and, in any event, it has little foundation in reality. With appropriate governance, adequate resourcing and the adoption of appropriate change management methodologies, business change becomes a systematic, embedded process.

Last, business change needs to be measured; benefits need to be realised and savings captured.

How we can do this

Leadership teams must determine how to establish the necessary capacity and capability to support a business change programme. The programme must have the explicit endorsement at both senior management and political levels.

A good starting point is to establish a consensus around the priority outcomes that the organisation, alone or in partnership, is seeking to achieve and then establish a specific programme to deliver these. It may be sensible to identify a senior manager with a broad understanding and ideally experience of technology, organisational development, process management, information management, restructures, and partnership working to lead the work corporately.

The resulting programme teams must continue to be actively supported by the leadership. Adequate resources need to be identified and allocated to the programmes. In a time of public sector austerity innovative funding options may need to be explored. To manage the risk, business cases need to be robust, evidence based and have broad organisational support. The programme teams must be multi-disciplinary to ensure that the change activity is systemic.

The leadership must constantly strive to overcome organisational resistance to change by widespread engagement with employees, repeatedly making the case for change but having the flexibility to respond to legitimate concerns.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Initiate a business change programme. Recognise the crucial role that the modern CIO plays in such programmes.

CIO: Consider your leadership role in organisational change and understand the partnerships that need to be put in place to deliver the change programme. Be honest about the gaps in your own knowledge and experience and identify how these can be addressed.

CFO: Balance the need to make short term cost savings with the delivery in the medium term of greater organisational value. Identify and secure funding for business change activity.

6. ICT policies of central government departments

In five years time…

Central government departments will be designing ICT policies based on a presumption of close integration of central government services with local public services delivery. This will be essential if public services are to become more integrated and delivered with a stronger local perspective.

Citizens and businesses will have even greater expectations for public services to be holistic – joined up, fast, low cost and intuitive. This can only be achieved through efficient local public services enabled by integrated and ‘agile’ architectures that assume collaborative, redesigned and innovative solutions.

Citizens will also expect greater control over their own data and interactions with government, challenging existing data protection practice as they assume the roles of data controller and custodian, in addition to that of data subject.

To accommodate this, new approaches to security, data sharing, access and transparency will need to be in place. Citizens will expect free access to their records and details in the same way they expect access to their on-line bank accounts.

What needs to change and why

This implies a radical change in thinking and in trust, as much as the change it implies for ICT policy and strategy itself. It will, for example, demand a systems architecture that will be markedly different from that in place today. Collaborative designs will lead practice, involving civil society, local public service organisations and the private sector.

Much of this architecture will be dependent upon open standards for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and open source solutions (or at least common solutions) to provide the ‘glue’ that integrates systems and manages the secure exchange of data between them. The barriers to open source solutions that existing procurement practices effect, will need to be removed.

Efficiency of local public services is impacted by decision making and practice by central government departments. This includes ICT directives and how ICT is used to implement and deliver central government services. Central and local public services will need to coalesce much more strongly than at present around local delivery, enabled by common information assurance and standards, especially in areas such as health and social services.

The previous preoccupation of government ICT strategy and delivery with large scale, proprietary ICT architectures and systems needs to change. There should be a presumption placed on suppliers to provide APIs and to offer open source options. The prospect is to significantly lower the cost of ICT, through reuse of assets and components, making possible more flexible and responsive systems architectures for local needs.

All ICT systems should be developed so that transparency is a key deliverable; systems should consistently provide coherent cost and performance data that can be made publicly available and be configured so that the progress of requests made by individuals and information held about them is securely available.

Local choice must be available over the exact combination of systems and solutions to fit the regional/sub-regional setting and the deployment of shared service approaches. Whilst ICT infrastructures need to combine, and information needs to be shared, there will be an expectation of priorities being set much more by local circumstances – including geography, demographics and local choices.

How we can do this

The following steps should be considered by both central and local public services alike:

• All public services should adopt a nationally recognised Public Sector Network to remove duplication, reduce costs and improve information sharing. These assets should be sharable with the communities who ultimately pay for them – local businesses and for example rural communities with poor broadband.
• A single identity management and verification standard for employees and citizens to access all government services (excluding the highest levels) should be introduced. This should be a franchise arrangement adopting agreed standards and controls, not a single Whitehall owned service or project.
• ICT systems architects should work closely with the full range of central and local public service organisations, and with the civil society community on collaborative standards and solution designs at a regional/sub-regional local level. These should be ultimately sharable and procurement practices will need to change to achieve this more easily than is the case at present.
• Public services should be designed and developed with these standards and common infrastructures in mind (e.g. PSNs and shared ICT services arrangements).
• A central repository for standard, open architectural patterns for local public services should be developed by local public services for local public services – Socitm and others could lead on this.
• There should be a repository of well-packaged, easy to acquire, open source, low-cost, reusable solutions for local public services, underpinned by case studies and associated technology blueprints.
• The market, including SMEs, should be incentivised to offer shared service offerings of generic ICT infrastructure products suitable for the local public services environment.
• Any device access should be enabled though standards that define web services, application delivery via ‘thin client’, security, accessibility, and sustainability.
• All services should be designed to be accessed by mobile devices, whether for self or intermediated access.

These do not assume any one delivery model – public sector owned, outsourced, off-shored, cloud, mutualised. A mix will develop but based on best practice, benchmarked performance, low cost, risk management and value. Dogmatism or political ‘sound bites’ about delivery models are mostly unhelpful and have held back much of the change needed in UK public services in the past.

What key players need to do now

CEO: Lead the engagement of central and local public services to coalesce around local delivery, enabled by common information assurance approaches and standards, especially in areas such as health and social services.

CIO: Work with ICT systems architects to embrace the full range of central and local public service organisations, and the civil society community in collaborative standards and solution designs at a regional/sub-regional local level.

CFO: Realise the benefits and savings from more closely integrated services at the regional/subregional level.

Next steps – Planning the Route

Planting the Flag is a ‘call to action’ from the Local CIO Council working in partnership with Socitm Futures. It demands action that follows some key principles:

• Be bold, be radical and be quick – focus and plan reform in line with public service outcomes, and business and organisational requirements.
• Think the unthinkable – question the beliefs that are preventing you from moving forward rapidly.
• Don’t re-organise, reform – collaborate, redesign and innovate.
• Think paradigm shift not step change – do not waste time and resources making small incremental steps.
• Manage expectations, be realistic and remember the outcomes service users value will be delivered by people, performing processes, with information, underpinned and enabled through technology.

The next phase of the strategy, Planning the Route, will be run as a campaign sponsored, endorsed and ultimately overseen by the Local CIO Council. Socitm Futures will set out a plan for the campaign – the ‘map, compass, guides, skills and knowledge’. This will include:

Stimulating regional and sub-regional development of detailed action plans. These plans will be:

• Facilitated by Socitm Regions working alongside local partners
• Aligned with the recent Government ICT Strategy and equivalent strategies for the devolved administrations
• Enabled by common information, security and technology standards, brokered by the Local CIO Council with partners (including the Local e Government Standards Body) across local public services

Guiding and supporting these plans through Socitm’s research, benchmarking and consultancy resources, specifically by providing:

• Regional workshops on developing the strategic capabilities and dealing with the six key issues identified in Planting the Flag
• Guides based on the workshop outcomes
• Benchmarking activity
• Expertise, case studies and knowledge in specific areas e.g. shared service models and their implementation.

Engaging key stakeholders through briefings, presentations, workshops, and guides. Stakeholders include:

• Cabinet Office
• HM Treasury (HMT)
• Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)
• The Local Government Delivery Council (LGDC)
• Local Government Association (LGA)
• Local Government Improvement and Development (LGI&D)
• Local eGovernment Standards Body (LeGSB)
• Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (Solace)
• Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA)
• Institute of Revenues, Rating and Valuation (IRRV)
• British Computer Society (BCS)
• Association of Directors of Adult Social Care – Information Management Group (ADASS-IMG)
• National Health Service (NHS)
• Civil Society Sector
• Emergency services
• Intellect
• Suppliers

Initial timetable (2011)

• 15 June: Campaign plan to be presented to the Local CIO Council.
• 17 June: First regional workshop in Socitm East.
• June/July: Seek endorsement from the Cabinet Office and CLG.
• Sept – Oct: Continue regional workshops.
• Nov: Socitm annual conference to major on progress with Planning the Route.

How the strategy is being developed

Planting the Flag is a Local CIO Council initiative led by Socitm’s Futures group.

The project has been led by Socitm’s Head of Policy, supported by a small editorial team and a number of workstream project teams.

The approach taken has been one of collaborative engagement with a wide range of key stakeholders including those listed above.

Internally, Socitm has worked closely with its members through regional meetings, its main conference and its business streams.

During March and April 2011, a web-based consultation was undertaken to open up the deliberation to the widest possible audience and to enable transparent development of the strategy

The Strategy will be championed by the Local CIO Council, submitted to the CIO Council and owned by local public services. It will also translate those strands of the Government’s ICT strategy that are relevant to local public services into strategic actions by CIOs to reform service design and efficiency at a regional/sub-regional level.

Acknowledgements and endorsements

The Local CIO Council was set up in 2008 at the invitation of the Government’s Chief Information Officer. It represents the views and interests of local government to the main government CIO Council run by the Cabinet Office.

The Local CIO Council and Socitm Futures wishes to acknowledge the wide range of contributions made during the online consultation and in a variety of conferences, seminars, meetings and other fora to the development of Planting the Flag. Special mention should be made of:

• Objective Corporation – use of the uEngage online collaboration platform for the online consultation on Planting the Flag.
• Deloitte – programme management.

Editorial Board

• Glyn Evans, President of Socitm and Corporate Director of Business Change, Birmingham City Council
• Jos Creese, Past President of Socitm, Chair, Local CIO Council, Head of IT, Hampshire County Council
• Dylan Roberts, Chair, Socitm Futures, Chief Officer (ICT) Leeds City Council
• Geoff Connell, CIO, London Boroughs of Newham and Havering
• Martin Ferguson, Head of Policy, Socitm

Endorsements

“As Government CIO I welcome this Strategy for ICT-enabled local public services reform. We face a challenging agenda across all parts of the public services, with the imperative to provide better for less. Citizens’ expectations of public services delivery are high and the themes contained in ‘Planting the Flag’ rise to the challenge of delivery of improved services while at the same time cutting costs. We must also continue to innovate, adopting new processes and developing new products to meet the growing challenges faced by the public sector. The core themes of ‘Planting the Flag’: sharing and re-using our assets, simplifying and standardising our services and empowering citizens and communities, are also fully aligned with the actions highlighted in our central Government ICT Strategy. I look forward to forging a close working relationship with local government colleagues as we harness the opportunities of our joint agendas.”

Joe Harley, government CIO

Socitm is planting a very important role with this work. Slick, customer-friendly, ICT-enabled services are the future. Implemented skillfully they will pay critical dividends not only in terms of financial savings and service improvements but also for organisational reputation.

Steve Freer, Chief Executive, CIPFA

As Head of the HM Government Skunk works I am pleased to welcome “Planting the Flag” as a key contribution to encouraging community-led strategies for digital local public services, which will help maximise the benefits of localism and support Big Society outcomes. I am sure that “Planning the Route” will prove an invaluable guide to the everchanging digital landscape and our collective responsibility to drive maximum benefit from limited public funds. Together these strategic tools will provide an added impetus to the existing work of local councils and their partners around shared priorities such as the personalisation of local services, and creating stronger and safer communities.

Mark O’Neill, Chief Information Officer, DCLG and DCMS